Sydney felt as if he were floating except for the rhythmic stroking of his brow with gentle fingers. He was warm, which was a wonder considering the fact of how cold it was and that he hadn’t fed the fire for a while. Maybe Bennings had taken over the task when he’d fallen asleep – he’d have to remember to thank the man later. Strange, though, the pain between his shoulder blades that had literally done him in was now gone – and the headache that had been the worst part of seeing double had abated greatly. Had Parker managed to get some of her migraine medicine into him too now? He wouldn’t put it past her…

Still the rhythmic brush of fingertips against his brow continued. Was that Miss Parker? She’d become very protective and almost demonstrative there just before he’d fallen asleep – was this her way of telling him she cared without need for words? It would be nice to think so – it was enticing to think that he was seeing at last the possibility to air at least a little of the love he’d borne for the daughter of his friend and patient Catherine. All he had to do was open his eyes…

It took a moment for his vision to clear – and he was thrilled that he wasn’t seeing double anymore. But his pleasure turned to shocked surprise when he finally recognized who was sitting next to him, brushing her fingers across his brow. “M…Mi…”

“I’m here, Sydney,” Michelle smiled at him – a wide smile of pure happiness. “I was afraid that you would never wake up again.”

“How…” He didn’t dare move his head – when last he remembered, he hadn’t been able to do more than just roll his eyes without causing himself major agony. “Where…”

“You’re in the hospital,” she explained, her fingers resuming their gentle stroking of his brow. “They brought you in yesterday morning – you were in surgery most of the afternoon…” Her blue-grey eyes filled with tears. “They tell me they almost lost you once.”

“Miss… Parker…” He opened his eyes wide and tried to look around without moving.

“She’s next door, Sydney,” Michelle soothed. “She was in surgery a long time as well. But her brother says that she’ll be fine…”

“Lyle… is here?” Sydney’s movements became more purposeful. He tried to maneuver himself up on an elbow – amazed that his left arm was once more following instructions, and even more amazed that the movement wasn’t making him nearly black out with pain. But his movements were impeded – he had on a thick, cervical collar that made shoulder movements clumsy.

“Not Lyle, Sydney, Ethan,” Michelle very cautiously put her hand on the middle of his chest. “Lie still, my love. You can’t move around like that.”

Sydney’s brows were pulled together in a frown. “How…” His eyes caught and held hers tightly. “Why are you here?”

Michelle ran her fingers through his silver hair. “Jarod called me yesterday and told me what had happened. He wired me the ticket. I traveled all night…”

Again Sydney began to struggle. “Jarod?” he gaped and then called out, “Jarod!” and then shot her a look of desperation. “Where is he?”

“Shhhh…” Michelle shook her head. “He’s not here.” She smiled sadly when the tired chestnut eyes found her again. “He came for his friend and figured that I would want to be here if I knew about your being on that horrible flight – and by the time I’d gotten here this morning, his friend had checked out of the hospital and they both were gone.”

“His friend?” Sydney frowned.

“Someone named Bennings – he was on the plane with you…”

Sydney settled back into his comfortable pillow with a sigh. Bennings had been a friend of Jarod’s – and now they both were gone. Once more his former protégé had danced alluringly close and then vanished into the woodwork. Thinking about Jarod not wanting to stick around to at least say hello hurt, however – and Sydney turned his mind deliberately from thinking in that direction. That would be better done when he was alone – when he didn’t have to hide the tears and the regret. “I take it,” he began in a more reasonable voice and without the struggles, “that I’m not in such great shape.”

Michelle began to stroke his brow again. “No, you’re not,” she admitted. “You have a herniated disk and a crushed vertebrae and a concussion with complications. You’re lucky that you didn’t end up a quadriplegic – although it came close.” She picked up his left hand. “Can you feel this?”

The hand tightened in hers. “Yes,” he answered with a smile. “I couldn’t there for a while, you know…”

She let out a shaky sigh of relief. “The doctors knew they had relieved some of the pressure on pinched nerves that were the result of your back injury, but they didn’t know how much if any of the damage was going to be permanent.”

He closed his eyes, suddenly very tired. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to fade out…” he began.

“Don’t be,” she comforted him, her fingers moving slowly and surely across his brow. “Go back to sleep. You need your rest.”

“Jarod…” Sydney murmured as he floated off on the soft cushion of pain medications.

Michelle frowned as she watched him fall back asleep. She’d known that Jarod’s leaving would be upsetting to the old psychiatrist who’d raised him – she’d tried to talk the Pretender into staying at least until Sydney regained consciousness.

“I can’t stay,” he’d argued gently. “I have to get my friend to where he was going originally – and besides, Sydney has a life that doesn’t include me anymore. I don’t need to hang around and make him feel guilty for what happened all those years ago anymore.”

“I wish I could,” he told her in a voice filled with sadness. “But I can’t. Tell him I’ll be in touch, though. I’ll call him, one of these days.”

And right now, hearing the desolation in Sydney’s voice calling for his former protégé, Michelle would have hogtied Jarod to a chair had he been anywhere close by. It isn’t fair, she thought to herself and stroked Sydney’s brow again. It was all she could do.

~~~~~~~~~*

“Can you believe this?” Stan Bridges shook his head in amazement as he put another blue tack right next to the red one that had been stuck in a map of the Eastern seaboard states. “That makes the fourth time this Lyle Parker was in the same city as one of the murdered girls.”

“Five,” Bill Lowe walked over to him carrying another paper from the fax machine. “There was an industrial convention in Atlantic City in November of 2000, and the Centre was there en force, according to this information from the convention’s organizers. Top brass were there to answer questions about their R&D departments – and in this case, that top brass included…”

“Mr. Parker,” Bridges pulled another blue tack from the box and put it into the map. “This is getting a little too much to be mere coincidence.”

“What do we know about this guy, really?” Lowe sat down at the table and began to sift through the papers that were scattered across it. “Have you seen any school records – a birth certificate – anything?”

Bridges shook his head. “No, and it’s been damned odd. It’s almost as if this character appeared out of nowhere in about 1994 – we have records of his American-issued visa entering the country from South Africa…”

“The first murder – if it really IS the first murder,” Lowe pointed to the first white board, with the pictures of the Asian women, “took place in 1994. This guy enters the country in New York, and three months later, we have a dead girl in New York City.”

“You know, I was almost hoping that I’d have to do some serious groveling to apologize to that cute little Patterson girl,” Bridges sighed as he sat down across the table from his partner. “But from what we’ve managed to collect so far, I think we’re doing her a huge favor by putting her boyfriend under a microscope.”

“Hey, you guys should see this,” Cal Jefferson exclaimed after a single knock on the interrogation room door warned of his barging on in. The rookie had been set to looking on the police sites for cold cases that looked anything like their case – from the looks on his face, he’d found something.

“What is it?”

“Seems the guy you two are looking at has been a subject of police interest before.” Jefferson flopped a copy of a news article, complete with pictures, down in front of Bridges. “I got to thinking that some of what I was hearing you guys talk about sounded familiar, so I did some digging on my own. Virginia police were looking at someone who looked an awful lot like your suspect for a double murder…”

“Oh my God!” Lowe sighed as he showed the photograph in the news story to his partner. “This is our suspect, all right…”

“Robert Bowman…” Bridges read the caption beneath the photograph. “Same guy?”

“Look at him!” Lowe shoved the picture across the table with the force of frustration. “If it isn’t him, then he’s got a twin or a doppelganger somewhere doing pretty nasty stuff…”

“Nothing about him missing a thumb,” Bridges mentioned after snatching the story and starting to read. “Still…” He gazed at Lowe. “It wouldn’t hurt to put in a call to the Virginia State Police and see if we can’t get some information on the crimes themselves…”

“Look at the date!” Lowe had come around to peer over Bridges’ shoulder at the article and finally noted the date at the top of the page. “That’s a full ten years before any of the cases we were looking at…”

“How long has this animal been out there?” Bridges turned and looked over his shoulder at his younger partner. “What have we tripped over here?”

“I found something important?” the young man asked brightly, his dark eyes sparkling with excitement.

“You sure did,” Lowe congratulated him. “Keep on digging, Cal. Looks like you have a nose for this end of the investigation.”

Jackson grinned and backed out of the interrogation room. Bridges looked back at his partner. “Robert Bowman? An alias, do you think, or the guy’s real name?”

“Either way, we need to trace it out,” Lowe entered the name into the FBI database. “Let’s see what we get this time.”

~~~~~~~~~*

Bennings turned his attention from the scenery that surrounded their car as they approached Elko, Nevada to the man behind the wheel of the little sedan. “OK, Jarod, we’re on the way to San Francisco – and you promised to tell me just what the Hell you meant when you said there were people from your past that you thought you’d left in the past, or something like that…”

Jarod sighed. He’d been expecting this question for a while now, and he still hadn’t formulated a decent answer to it yet. “It’s complicated,” he hedged.

“We have several hours in the car for you to uncomplicated it for me,” Bennings looked back out the windshield at the empty landscape around him. “Talk to me. Just who are these people that I know in a way?”

“Doctor Sydney Green and Miss Parker,” Jarod answered finally, knowing that he might as well give over some substantial information or risk being hounded for the rest of the trip.

“Sydney? You mean the old man from the plane…”

“Yeah.” Jarod ran his left hand through his hair nervously. “For longer than I want to think about, I was his protégé – his student. He was my Pygmalion.”

Carl gazed evenly at his companion. “And this was a bad thing? Sydney seemed to be a pretty level-headed and wise old bird. And Parker…” He smiled and shook his head in appreciation. “Mmmm-MMM! I’d imagine that under different circumstances, that woman would be magnificent.” Jarod withheld comment, mostly because Bennings’ assessments of both were spot on – and Bennings was quick to pick up on that. “Neither of them seems like an ogre, Jarod. What gives that you don’t want to be around them?”

The Pretender glanced over at his passenger, debating just how much of his past to reveal. “You don’t understand…” he began again.

“You’re damned right I don’t. Explain to me why you don’t want to be around them.” Bennings wasn’t about to let his friend off the hook.

“You may find this hard to believe…” Jarod started after another long pause to try to marshal his thoughts.

“We’ll worry about that after I hear your story,” Bennings told him with a smile. “Just spit it out, Jarod – considering some of the things you know about me, I seriously doubt that there’s much you could tell me that would make me think less of you.”

Jarod sighed, and Bennings’ eyes narrowed. Whatever it was that Jarod was having such trouble telling, HE thought it was bad enough. “You know that my family lives in Virginia?”

“Yeah. I met your parents once about a year ago, remember?” Bennings could remember the pretty red-haired lady that Jarod had introduced as his mother, and her handsome ex-military husband. “Neat people – you all seem very close.”

“They didn’t raise me,” Jarod told him bluntly. “When I was very small, I was stolen from them.”

“By Sydney?” Bennings’ eyes were wide with both surprise and disbelief.

“No, not by Sydney,” Jarod admitted, “but by the corporation he worked… works… for. It’s a place called The Centre – you’ve heard of it, I know…”

Bennings’ brows furled. “It’s a think-tank isn’t it?”

Jarod shrugged. “That’s one of its many disguises, I suppose. Anyway, Sydney was the psychiatrist that was assigned as my trainer. He may not have stolen me, but he raised me knowing that I was locked away in a tiny room every night…”

“You’re kidding!”

“I told you that you were going to find this hard to believe,” Jarod reminded him with a stoic tone. “For almost thirty years, Sydney was the only person I felt might actually care about me – the only adult, anyway. But he never said or did anything…”

“Oh, c’mon now! Every kid has friends growing up…”

“I did, for a little while, anyway,” Jarod agreed. “That’s where Miss Parker comes in…”

“She came to work with her father?”

Jarod glanced over at his friend sharply. “What do you know about her father?”

Bennings stared at him. “Sydney’s her father – right?”

Jarod chuckled sadly and shook his head. “Not by a long shot. Her father was the head cheese – the Chairman of the Centre. He was too busy with Centre affairs – too busy stealing children and having them perform simulations to discover information that could be sold to the highest bidder to kill and maim and…” He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them to concentrate on his driving. “Sydney was just an employee – someone old man Parker foisted her off on when he was too busy for her.”

Bennings simply nodded. “That explains why they’re close, and why both of them let the impression that she was his daughter go unchallenged.”

Jarod glanced at his friend again. “I’m surprised Miss Parker let it slide – she’d be the one to be protesting the fastest…”

“Nope, she didn’t correct me at all – and she had plenty of opportunity.”

It was something to consider, and Jarod rolled the fact around in his head for a moment. Parker wasn’t correcting Carl when he assumed she was Sydney’s daughter. Was she that desperate after finding out that Raines was supposedly her sire that she would let his old mentor adopt her – at least unofficially – in the eyes of a stranger?

“Jarod!” Bennings shook Jarod’s shoulder a little. “Don’t space out on me, man! I just survived a plane wreck – I don’t need to take chances on having the same luck on a car wreck too.”

“Sorry.” Jarod was appalled. “You see why I’d just as soon these people stayed in my past now…”

“Not really.” Bennings thought about all he’d been told. “They still seem like otherwise nice, intelligent people – and they weren’t responsible for stealing you…” He blinked. “How long after you were stolen did your family find you again?”

“They didn’t,” Jarod said bluntly. “I escaped about ten years ago – and I found them eventually.” His mouth drew down to a thin, unhappy line. “And Miss Parker and Sydney were part of the team the Centre put together to try to keep me from finding them and bring me back in again.”

“What the Hell did the Centre want you for so badly?” Bennings asked heatedly. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Jarod sighed. “It’s because of who I am – what I am.”

“A genius, granted…”

He shook his head. “It’s more than that. I have a very special anomaly in my genetics that makes it possible for me to become a Pretender…”

“A what?!”

“A Pretender. I can become anyone or anything I want to be – or anyone or anything that Sydney was instructed to tell me to be in order to problem-solve or strategize. I’d be given enough physical clues – props, sights, sounds, smells – to slip into the mind of a person in a situation and either see what happened in the past or predict what that person would do in the future.”

Bennings’ look of skepticism was back. “And this, to the Centre, was a profitable project?”

“Very.” Jarod’s voice was bleak. “Profitable enough that they were willing to try some pretty off-the-wall stunts to either get me back or duplicate me.” He sighed. “But that really doesn’t have anything to do with Sydney or Miss Parker.”

“They were part of a recovery team - so you’re saying they chased you?”

Jarod nodded. “For nearly six years solid.”

”What happened then?”

Jarod looked at his friend. “I’m a genius – I’d been toying with them to get clues to my actual family. When I had everything I needed to do the last of the legwork myself, I took myself out of the game.” He glanced at Bennings again. “That was about a year before I started working for you.”

Bennings was rubbing his chin. “So you’ve been hiding from the Centre in my Foundation?”

“Not really,” Jarod shook his head. “I’d reclaimed my real last name, but borrowed Sydney’s to get the certification I needed to qualify for the job. I wasn’t about to get either in such a way that the Centre would be able to trace back to my real family. Besides, the Centre wouldn’t have dreamed that I would be employed right out in the open with a firm that they either dealt with or did work for on an on-going basis…”

“So while you worked for me, you hid in plain view – but you were still hiding.” Bennings’ voice held a note of disappointment.

“At first, perhaps,” Jarod admitted uncomfortably. “But you and I became friends – and then I stayed because I like the job, I liked what you were doing, and I liked you. I had a sister who worked in Philly too – and it was like I’d found a normal life that I could call my own. I stopped hiding a long time ago.”

“OK, so let me get this straight,” Bennings said, shifting in his seat so he was sitting up straighter. “You hate Sydney and Miss Parker because they chased you all over creation…”

“I don’t hate them,” Jarod complained immediately, as defensive with Bennings as he had been with Michelle on the phone the night before.

Bennings tipped his head. “All right…” he said slowly. “So maybe you want to explain to me why you don’t want to be around these people – other than the fact that they keep chasing you…”

“It’s… they remind me of things I’d rather forget,” Jarod blurted finally, “nightmares I’d rather not have anymore.”

“Were they responsible for these things?” Bennings pressed.

“Yes… NO!... Well, in a way…”

The sandy-haired man shook his head. “Stop the car, Jarod.”

“What?” Jarod braked hard and pulled to a halt at the side of the highway. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re going in the wrong direction.”

“Say what?” The Pretender stared. “I thought you wanted to get to San Francisco…”

“I do,” Bennings admitted. “But I think there’s something you need to do first – and you can’t do it in San Francisco. We need to go back.”

“Why?” Jarod’s mouth gaped.

“Because you can’t reconcile yourself with your past by running away from it,” Bennings said simply. “You don’t hate these people – actually, anybody with even half a lick of sense could see that you care a lot for them. But you keep running away from them.” He put his hand on Jarod’s forearm. “You say this Centre place kept you locked away. That IS the past, I’ll admit – but who’s the one locking you away out here?”

“I don’t understand,” Jarod shook his head.

“For as long as you run from them, you’ll be in hiding – even if it’s out in the open. You’ll be locking yourself in a prison of your own making – in your mind, at least – and no doubt blaming them,” his finger jerked over his shoulder, “for holding the key and keeping you there. That’s not a ‘normal’ life, and you know it. You want a normal life? Then you face your past – all of it – and you learn to get around it. Anything else leaves you crippled in one way or another. I’d be a damned poor friend if I let you go on this way for long.”

Jarod sat there, stewing. What Bennings said made sense – Ethan had tried to tell him roughly the same thing many times over the past few years, only to be dismissed as biased toward his half-sister. He glanced at his friend and found him nodding. “You know I’m right,” Bennings told him quietly. “Turn the car around – you need to go back.”

“I don’t want to go back to the Centre!” Jarod exclaimed with a note of desperation.

“You won’t. Not if I’m with you.” Bennings stated patiently. “I’m a little bit too high-profile to do away with quietly – especially now that I’ve survived this damned plane crash. You make your peace and then, when you walk away this time, you can walk away and not feel like you have to keep looking over your shoulder.” He sat and watched his friend ponder. “Turn the car around, Jarod. We need to be back in Ogden.”

Jarod sighed and then eased the car back out onto the road, heading for the next wide spot where he could make a U-turn.

“Good,” Bennings nodded. “And while we’re on the way, you can tell me all about being a… what did you call it? Oh yeah… a Pretender.”

~~~~~~~~~*

Miss Parker heaved a deep sigh and slowly opened her eyes. It was morning already – there was muted sunlight coming in through the window not far away. Slowly her eyes focused until she could see clearly the person who sat in the chain next to her, his head back against the wall behind him, resting. It had been a long time since last she’d seen her half-brother – when he’d vanished after saving her from a fiery death.

The time had evidently been used well. Ethan was tanned and fit, his hair no more or less long than it had been before – but he’d filled out some. He wasn’t thin and pale and unhealthy-looking anymore. Whoever he’d been with had taken good care of him – and she suspected that any gratitude she had on that score was rightfully owed to Major Charles. At least Ethan had one of his parents.

Slowly she used her good hand to push herself up in bed a little more. On the wheeled table next to her sat a tray with food – breakfast, from the looks of it – that had grown cold over time. Even if she’d been hungry, the juice container had a covering over it that would need more than one hand to remove and she’d never been very good handling a spoon or fork with her left hand.

“Here, I’ll help you sit up a bit more,” Ethan’s voice came at her softly so as not to startle, and he had the control to her bed in his hand and raised her head until she nodded sufficiency. “How are you this morning?”

Her mouth worked for a moment, still quite dry. “Thirsty,” she replied, her eyes on the little container of juice on her tray.

“Hang on.” Ethan walked around the end of the bed, opened the juice container and slipped a straw into it that had been in a plastic water glass not far away. He brought the juice down to where she could steer the straw into her mouth with her left hand.

She had never tasted anything quite so good as the sweetened apple juice – it refreshed her mouth from feeling and tasting like the Mojave Desert and even managed to awaken her a little more completely. “What are you doing here?” she asked once the juice was completely gone.

Grey eyes so much like her mother’s regarded her fondly. “You were hurt – I had to come.”

“Where’s Sam?”

Ethan smirked. “I told him to hit a drugstore on the way back to the motel and get some pills for his headache. He’s been functioning on adrenaline ever since he signed himself out of the Dover hospital.”

“What was he in the hospital for?” Miss Parker frowned. Had Sam been hurt, and that was the reason he’d missed their flight?

Ethan shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him. All I know is that slogging through the snow to find you and then the fight with the sweeper yesterday didn’t do him any good. He looked about the color of driven snow when I got here this morning.”

“A fight?” Miss Parker’s brows knit. “With what sweeper?”

“The one Lyle sent to kill you and Sydney,” Ethan answered without softening the blow. “Evidently Mr. Raines died in a car bombing a few days ago, and Lyle wanted to make sure that he had no obstructions to his assuming the Chairmanship…”

“That bastard…” Miss Parker shifted as if to sit up straighter, only to wilt back into her pillow with a groan and a sigh. “Ethan, you know as well as I do that sweepers work in teams…”

“The sweeper that was up on the mountain with you backed down when Sam faced off with him,” Ethan told her with a shake of the head. “He told Sam the termination order was wrong – no code name, no paperwork…”

“Plausible deniability,” Miss Parker explained in a brittle tone. “Lyle could disavow any knowledge of how or why I died.” She gave a short, dark huff. “I bet he was praying to whatever gods he worships that I’d died in the crash and saved his sweepers any bother…”

Ethan watched his sister’s face. “What are you going to do now, then?”

Miss Parker relaxed into her pillow and considered the strange position she was in. A single call to the Triumvirate headquarters would put a serious kink in Lyle’s plans for a quick and smooth take-over – and the bastard wouldn’t even know what hit him. But did she really want to have the Chairmanship herself? Hadn’t she been dreaming of being able to walk away from those darkened hallways once and for all? Was this her chance?

“I need to call Africa,” she said finally. “I need to tell them that I’m alive and could use some extra security.” She closed her eyes briefly and then opened them. “How’s Sydney?”

“I passed Michelle in the hallway a while ago,” Ethan told her, “and she said that he was awake for a little bit.”

“Michelle’s here?” Miss Parker was astonished. “How did she find out so fast?”

“Jarod called her.”

Grey met grey solidly, Miss Parker’s gaze stunned and Ethan’s calm and slightly sad. “Did you say Jarod called her?”

Ethan nodded. “Last night.”

“He’s here?”

Now Ethan shook his head slowly. “He left this morning with his friend, Bennings.”

“Without at least saying a simple ‘hello – too bad you’re still alive – catch me if you can’?”

Ethan’s eyes reflected sympathy. “He didn’t think it was a good idea to stick around too much. He said for me to tell you that he’d be in touch…”

“Did he now?” Miss Parker was feeling an odd combination of frustration and relief – relief that whoever it was in that San Francisco asylum, it wasn’t her childhood friend; frustration that Jarod couldn’t even put aside his disappearing act for one moment.

“I tried to talk him out of leaving,” Ethan complained softly.

Her gaze landed on her half-brother gently. “I’m sure you did. But Jarod can have his head up his ass despite all efforts to the contrary, can’t he?”

Ethan nodded silently. He’d been right – she was pissed and hurt that Jarod had left without a single word to her. If and when Jarod ever decided to try to set things right, he’d have to deal with the fact that much of the hurt associated with the latter years of his association with Miss Parker would be on his head, not hers.

~~~~~~~~~*

Lyle sat in his comfortable leather chair, staring out the window at the manicured lawns of the Centre and the ocean beyond with fingers steepled in front of his face thoughtfully. He’d been like this since Phil had left to handle the scheduled meeting with Agent Stein, pondering the mixed bag that had been his morning so far.

The fact that Angelo was nowhere to be found was very disquieting – but not entirely unexpected. Angelo knew the inner workings of the Centre better than any other human being; it stood to reason that if there were a place where he could hide from the effects of gas, he’d know it and be there. When Phil was done talking to the FBI, he had the assignment of going over the files of the dozens of Centre inmates looking for another empath. Having an inside track on the minds of those he would be dealing with as Chairman was going to be essential.

More disturbing was the fact that there still was no word from Salt Lake City on the success of making sure Miss Parker wasn’t alive to get in his way. He’d actually called the general manager in the Salt Lake City office himself, only to be informed that the two sweepers – the best the office had on staff, no less – had been dispatched early the morning before and no word had been received from them since then. The news was filled with stories about there being six survivors of the flight – but no names had been released yet, supposedly pending the notification of next of kin of the dead. Well, HE was next of kin, and he hadn’t heard anything from United either yet.

There had been a few successes, however. The clerical minion assigned to write the report for the Triumvirate had coughed up an acceptable final draft at last, and the report had been tendered to Mr. Abé’s representative’s desk first thing that morning. The relative silence from that end of the field he was taking to mean that the report was succinct and filled with enough promise that even Mr. Abé was taking time to read it in full and slowly before finalizing his appointment as Chairman.

Colin Arnham, his friend from Johannesburg who had specialized in bombs for hire, was living his last day. The money necessary to take care of him had already been run through the laundering process and delivered to another friend from Cambodia. He’d paid to have Arnham’s body left where it would be easily discovered – and that would take care of the FBI investigation into Mr. Raines’ demise.

The money necessary to handle things in Baltimore had also made it through the laundering process, although none of it had been dispersed yet. Evidently the media had caught wind of the killing and was screaming – which would make any bribes to quell investigative efforts automatically suspect, and explosive if word got out. Lyle had toyed with the idea of just offing the cops involved already, before they got any solid information that would lead across state lines to Delaware, but hadn’t yet reached that point of desperation. He had a mole in the police department – hopefully he’d be on top of any major developments in the case.

And he’d finalized the terms on three military contracts that would go a long way toward putting the Centre back in the black. All in all, a fairly successful day. Successful enough that he deserved a reward – and there was really only one reward that he wanted more than anything else right now.

He pulled his cell phone from his jacket pocket and dialed.

“Hi, this is Erin’s answering machine. She’s either at work or school, so you get to talk to me instead. Leave a message, or I’ll never be able to tell her that you called. BEEP!”

“Hi,” he said softly, “it’s me. I was thinking that I’d pick you up tomorrow and take you out to dinner. I worry about you. Call me when you get this, OK?” He rattled off the number to his cell phone and then disconnected.

Folding his hands over his cell phone, he returned to staring out the window. Life at the top of the heap was good – just as he’d always known it would be.

~~~~~~~~~*

“Hey there!”

Miss Parker’s head turned in time to see Broots’ smiling face before there was a squeal of delight and Debbie pushed past her father to get to the bedside first. “We were so afraid,” the girl told her with wide eyes. “Afraid you were… well…” Debbie swallowed hard. “And then trying to get around the sweepers…”

“Looks like you and your dad managed pretty well,” the brunette in the bed smiled back.

“Well, that was Sam,” Broots admitted, coming up behind his daughter. “He had the sweepers pegged in New York and had a plan to get past anybody in Salt Lake City by the time we were over the Appalachians.” His hazel eyes glowed as if lit from within. “It’s good to see you, Miss Parker.”

“I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but it’s good to see you too, Scooby,” Miss Parker replied earnestly. “For a while there, I wondered if I’d ever see anybody again.”

“We looked in on you last night, but Sam said you were asleep and not to bother you.”

“From what I hear, Sam’s been taking good care of me,” she nodded. She smiled up at Debbie. “Don’t look so spooked, Debbie. Everything’s going to be all right…”

“The Centre’s chasing all of us now,” Broots informed her with a shake of the head. “I don’t know about everything being all right again for a while…”

“I’ve called the Triumvirate,” Miss Parker told her loyal tech with a smile. “It turns out that one of the three, Mr. Abé, was already in the States – having stopped at the Centre in the process of checking up on several Triumvirate projects around the country. My call was redirected to him – and it seems that Mr. Lyle filed a report this morning that assumes my death as a given. I was able to confirm that rumors of my death were exaggerated, to say the least.”

“Lyle’s making that report isn’t all that surprising – he sent out sweepers to make sure of it ahead of time,” Broots added caustically with more backbone than Miss Parker had seen from him in a long time.

“Well, Mr. Lyle will be having an interesting wake-up call later this afternoon,” Miss Parker smiled coldly at him, “and Sam won’t have to be standing guard all by himself soon, courtesy of Mr. Abé.”

“So we don’t have to run anymore?” Debbie sounded as if she was hesitant to be hopeful.

Miss Parker grasped Debbie’s hand with hers. “No. We’re done running, Debbie.” She looked over the girl’s shoulder at Broots. “Have you seen Sydney yet?”

Broots shook his head. “We were going to stop by after we finished here.”

“They won’t let me out of bed yet, or tell me anything about his condition,” Miss Parker complained with a frown. “When you see him, tell him we’re still on our clean slate.” She took in the look of confusion. “He’ll understand what I’m talking about. Then you can come back and tell me how he’s doing, understand?”

“Y…yes, ma’am,” Broots gave a resigned shrug. Why should he have expected that her expectations of him would have changed. Passing incomprehensible messages must be another part of his job description that lurked in the illegible fine print of his contract.

“And when I’m better,” she said with a glare of mock anger, “I have a bone to pick with you about passing the flu around without my express permission.”

Debbie giggled even as her father blanched. “I’m… sorry, Miss Parker…” he stammered.

“As long as you never give me the flu before I end up in a plane crash again,” she warned – and then her lips turned upwards. “Sit down before you fall down, Broots, and tell me what’s been going on at the Centre and in the world. I’m not going to bite, you know… I really am very glad to see you.”

Broots gave her a wary glance before following instructions. His boss was in a very strange mood – probably courtesy of the pain medication she was on – and he wasn’t exactly sure if this was when he should break the news about Jordan to her. No, on second thought, that could wait a while – until she was stronger and less likely to take out her emotions at the news on someone other than HIM.

He could wait until Sydney was in the kind of shape that he could help control the explosion that was destined to follow.

~~~~~~~~~*

Agent Stein was an unhappy man. Mr. Carew, supposedly Mr. Lyle’s right-hand man, had been unable to answer any of his questions – again. The stonewalling from the Centre was becoming downright frustrating. There was a connection – there had to be. Lyle had looked altogether too happy at the results of that car bomb for there NOT to be a connection. Unfortunately, his superiors – and federal law enforcement – required more than a gut instinct to put an obviously guilty man behind bars.

When his phone in his pocket chose that moment to begin chirping at him, therefore, he was even more pissed. He whipped the little device out and stabbed at the connect button without even a glance at the incoming caller. “What?” he demanded in an uncharacteristic display of ire.

“Agent Stein.” It was Ken Uribe, the Special Agent in Charge of the Dover field office. “You need to return to the office immediately.”

“What’s up?” Stein asked, far more conversationally. It just didn’t do to piss off one’s superior with no good reason other than sharing the misery.

“We just got a call from the DC office, and then a call from a couple of cops from the Baltimore, Maryland PD. Seems we may have your suspect on more than just paying to have his boss blown to smithereens.”

“Oh?” Stein halted in his walking toward his car. “Like what?”

“You need to come in,” Uribe insisted. “You’re going to want to sit down and listen to what these guys have managed to put together. If they’re right, you’ll be taking on the Delaware end of a very big case.”

“Damn it, Ken…”

“How does serial kidnap, rape and murder sit with you?”

Stein gulped and stared. “You think…”

“Like I said,” Uribe said a little more forcefully, “you need to get your ass back in here. There’s a lot of information to go through, and these cops could use some sort of response from us in the relative near future.”

“I’m on my way.” Stein disconnected the call and pulled his car keys from his pocket. Did he dare speed? This sounded important enough to warrant taking the chance…

~~~~~~~~~*

Al Douglas walked slowly into the hospital lobby and found what looked like it would be a comfortable seat not far from the volunteer’s desk. He felt completely wrung out after his long session with the NTSA shrink, and the hours spent dozing in his car hadn’t helped as much as he’d hoped they would.

No, the only thing he could think of that would help put his world back in order was to make contact with Miss Parker’s personal sweeper once more. Sam had played fair with him – he could hope that Sam would continue to play fair with him. Al didn’t like the feeling of having been hung out to dry by the Centre itself – and the only way he could think of to make up for that feeling of betrayal was to offer his services to Miss Parker herself.

After all, if the Tower had sent out one team to take care of her, no doubt it would consider sending out another if or when the first team lost contact or reported failure. He had no intention of calling in – but he could imagine Tom doing so, IF Sam had managed to keep him from getting anywhere near Miss Parker or Sydney.

God only knew when Sam would be walking through the lobby again. But Al would be there, and he would present his offer.

He had nothing better to do, after all…

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